WHAT ARE THE EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS TO THE SOLID WASTE PROBLEM?

WHAT ARE THE EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS TO THE SOLID WASTE PROBLEM?

Cebu City Mayor Nestor Archival has apparently found a practical solution to one of the country's biggest urban problems—the mounting cost of garbage. Is that not headline-worthy? We often dismiss garbage as something worthless, but perhaps that is exactly where we have been making our biggest mistake.

What many people still call "garbage" actually contains valuable resources. Organic waste can become compost and vermicast. Plastics, metals, paper, and glass can be recycled or upcycled. What is truly worthless is only the small residual portion that cannot be reused. If we continue treating everything as garbage, we will continue throwing away money.

The experience of Cebu City should serve as a wake-up call for every local government unit. By using mechanical shredders to process biodegradable waste into compost and eventually vermicast through African Night Crawler earthworms, the city reportedly reduced the amount of waste requiring landfill disposal to only about ten percent. The resulting compost is now being distributed to farmers as organic fertilizer, creating benefits not only for waste management but also for agriculture.

Mayor Archival also pointed out another reality that many LGUs have overlooked. Cebu City generates about 600 to 700 tons of waste every day, of which roughly 60 percent is biodegradable, 30 percent recyclable, and only 10 to 15 percent residual waste. Yet because of inadequate processing facilities, much of this still ends up in landfills. Following the closure of its landfill, hauling costs reportedly doubled from about ₱2.1 million to ₱4.2 million daily because garbage had to be transported about 80 kilometers away.

The closure of the facility has caused Mayor Archival to act on his city’s garbage problem, and that is how and why his friend, Mr. Ramon Uy, Sr. came to his rescue.


Mr. Uy is the owner and President of RU Foundry and Machinery Inc.(RUMI), a local company based in Bacolod City. Among many other products, it manufactures a brand of mechanical shredders that has already been tried and tested in many LGUs nationwide.


As a way of helping his friend Mayor Archival, he offered the free use of his shredders for trial purposes, just to see if it could help him with his garbage problem. That is how the good Mayor solved his city’s problem.

This confirms what many environmental advocates have been saying for years: the solution is not merely stricter enforcement of Republic Act 9003. Enforcement without infrastructure is incomplete. Segregating waste is important, but what happens after segregation? Without composting facilities, Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs), recycling plants, and upcycling centers, segregated waste simply gets mixed together again and hauled to landfills.

I have long advocated that we should stop thinking in terms of a linear economy where we "take, make, and dispose." Instead, we should embrace a true circular economy where waste becomes raw material for another product. Compost supports food security. Recyclables become new products. Residual waste can even be converted into Refuse-Derived Fuel (RDF) for cement plants instead of occupying expensive landfill space.

Perhaps it is also time for the national government to consider providing matching funds for composting facilities, modern MRFs, and recycling equipment instead of leaving financially constrained LGUs to solve the problem alone. Public-private partnerships can likewise accelerate investments in waste-processing technologies.

Garbage is not merely an environmental issue. It is also an economic issue, a public health issue, an agricultural issue, and even a climate issue. Every truckload diverted from the landfill means savings in hauling costs, reduced methane emissions, cleaner groundwater, and additional income opportunities from recycling and compost production.

Perhaps the real question is no longer how to dispose of garbage, but rather how to transform waste into wealth. Cebu City may have shown us that the answer begins not with bigger landfills, but with smarter thinking.

RAMON IKE V. SENERES

www.facebook.com/ike.seneres  iseneres@yahoo.com  senseneres.blogspot.com  09088877282/08-08-2027

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